What About

 

Ken Paxton. Herschel Walker. MTG. Pete Hegseth. Pam Bondi. Lauren Boebert. Matt Goetz. Kari Lake. Tommy Tuberville... DONALD TRUMP!

Graham Platner.

That’s all I have to say about that.

Well, okay. There’s hypocrisy enough to go around. But if democracy is to survive, and, given how many so-called patriots don’t care or would prefer it doesn’t, survival is hardly assured, it’s existentially critical that Democrats retake control of Congress. Also, Susan Collins is very annoying. 

If Dems were to retake the Senate – I mean, seriously, Paxton vs Talarico is a tough call?? – I’d hope they’d find a new majority leader. Which is all I have to say about that.

Speaking of Trump – our querimonious gudgeon-in-chief – it’s hard to say which is more obvious: his continual lies about his equally idiotic and catastrophic war, or that Iran is playing him like a pawn-shop ghaychak.

His only consistent approach is to lie that we won the war, that Iran has no military capability left, even as they continue to strike, and that prices are coming down. Who ya gonna believe? Trump or yer lyin’ gas pumps?

But that’s not his only consistency. Equally consequential and destructive is his penchant (I like people who pronounce it “ponSHAWN”) for hiring the most unqualified people available; people guaranteed to ignore the law and to do his bidding. Bill Pulte is the most recent and among the most glaring examples. Trump wants him to be our next Director of (oxymoron alert!) National Intelligence; a man with zero experience in the field. None. Less than Pentagon Pete had in managing the world’s largest military.

What pulled Pulte into contention is his history, as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, of drumming up fake charges against people Trump hates. For their truth-telling and for using their positions as our Constitution intended. Clever deceiver that he is, Trump posits Pulte as “temporary” director, thus avoiding the need for senate confirmation which, even from this Trump intanked collection of electorally invertebrate Republicans, appears uncertain.

He’ll be there long enough, though, to look for ways to charge Democrats with treason or something. That there’s little else of importance to be done as DNI is confirmed by Trump having him keep that housing job. I won’t mention the dildo thing. Not that kind of guy.

How about this: hiring Elias Irizarry a convicted, then pardoned, J6 rioter for a sensitive anti-terrorism job in the Pentagon? He was only nineteen at the time, and he has apologized for what he did, including, I guess, deleting a week’s worth of texts on his phone, before and after January 6. The job requires top-secret clearance. Some of the flying I did in Vietnam required that, too. They didn’t want to give it to me because my dad once had a law client who was the brother of a member of the Oregon Communist Party. I guess things are looser now, in the current administration.

At least Mr. Irizarry isn’t among the hundreds of pardoned J6 felons who’ve gone on to commit crimes running the gamut from property crimes, fraud, illegal firearm possession, planned assassination, and more. At least fourteen have been charged with sex crimes, including child abuse. Victims of President Biden’s government weaponization, Trump says, deserving of taxpayer money for reparations.

Follow the law? In testimony before Congress last week, Markwayne Mullin, another questionable hire as head of DHS, refused to commit to obeying court orders. For Trump, that’s the opposite of disqualifying.

Another consistency in today’s version of Republican conservatism is, since entering the Trump zone, axiomatic: any election in which a Republican candidate loses is, inarguably and definitionally, rigged. Evidence, consistently lacking in all instances, is unnecessary nor to be sought. All that’s required is saying so. The consistent debunking of every claim, from mules to hacked machines to millions of votes from non-citizens to forged mail-in ballots, only goes to prove it. Never has anyone produced a credible sequence of steps by which the rigging occurred.

California’s ridiculously slow vote-counting is perfect substrate for conspiracists, a group that includes House Speaker Holy Mike Johnson, a man by his own assertion in direct communication with God. “Look, some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it’s impossible to prove,” he said. “But I think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here.” The fact that it’s impossible to prove is all the proof Ministerial Mike needs. It’s instinct. Like Trump’s gut, as opposed to expert advice, when it comes to policy decisions.

We end today's reality check with something definitely-not cognitively-impaired, gut-following Trump posted on his Truthless Sociopath platform:

“Communists always do well with the Voters or, as they would say, THE PEOPLE, in the Early Years! But, in the end, the Country, State, or City, GOES TO HELL! Great Violence proceeds at levels never seen before, and the entity dissolves into Poverty, Squalor, and Crime. Remember, breathtaking ‘Popularity’ first, and then, guaranteed DEATH AND DESTRUCTION!” 

So sayeth the “Leader of the Free World.”